


It's never okay.

by graspthesanity



Series: C. Year Zero [6]
Category: Arctic Monkeys, Nine Inch Nails (Band)
Genre: 6th, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:01:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23432830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/graspthesanity/pseuds/graspthesanity
Summary: Alex loses himself after Alexa's death by being patient one with C. The paranoia and the wreckage of society comes to a halt when the worst happens: what we are all scared of.
Relationships: Alexa Chung/Alex Turner (Musician), Miles Kane/Alex Turner, Trent Reznor/Alex Turner
Series: C. Year Zero [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1684438
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

I stop in my tracks.

I hear Placebo's English Summer Rain playing softly distant in the streets, I hear a pickpocket getting called out for stealing an old phone.

“Go on.”

He's there. Long curls hanging over his face, the lips barely appearing, as I hold a bag with both hands, looking up. I don't know if he's staring at me. I could only get a glimpse of one eye.

It's hard to speak like this... I find it odd, I've always had a sofa. I mean... I'm used to-

“Would you really prefer a sofa, Alexa? Focus.”

My heartbeat rushes even further. A shiver runs past my spine.

I gulp and say it.

I don't know who I am anymore. Who even is Alexa?

“The person you see in the mirror is you.”

I have bandages all over my face, Doctor.

“But do you take them off by the end of the day? To see your battle scars...”

I do, I do. But am I a veteran? I tilt my head to the side. I don't feel that way, I hold my breath and tears, as I feel myself trying to slide underwater and I see every move, every argument my parents have had and then I look behind me, just to see them fade and the carcass of our floor with one single painting left.

I always felt like wars are a rocking horse these days with propaganda of the wrong fear and dying, dying, dying without knowing people. It becomes taboo to talk about wars. But people die!

“Did you die?”

No. But-

“You didn't. That's how it goes Alexa. You survived, you closed your eyes... So keep them closed from everything you've seen.”

But I no longer have an Alexa! I'm not even... Anyone... I'm just a title. Now it's being a number in Auschwitz. My mouth is taped shut and yours too, Trent. He looks up at me, with his cold eyes. Bites his tongue.

“Alex is dead...”

But how can I believe that? You're the media! I slam my hands on the table and I stand up from my chair, leaning towards Trent, who just leans back, coldly. Even his lover died. Or so he claims.

“Who are we?”

Soldiers.

And with that he pushes me out of his cabinet and I see an endless queue, as I walk, a different bag in both hands and I keep going, passing door after door, fixing the wig on my bandages... Lipstick drawn on and I cross my arms on my chest, sighing, until I hear loud male footsteps behind me. I turn around, I had seen Miles in the queue.

Bastard. Miles is a bastard.

Instead it's Trent.

“Let's go.”

I look at his through nearly shut eyes as we both go down the elevator without doing anything, but I have the image, that instead of flicking the lighter on and off, to toy with the smoke alarm, that he would push me to the wall and we would fuck.

Instead we walk. Trent takes off his medical coat in the first opportunity in an alley and shoves it in his backpack. We walk around without saying a word, I follow him until we are in a destroyed building where Placebo is playing. My eyes swell up with tears, but I don't rub them off and I take off my heels to climb over the fence. Trent stretches his arm to offer me help, but instead he stays guard.

Then he quickly climbs over, and we keep going through the tall grass, through carcasses of horses and children's radioactive chalk drawings which get stamped on my pantyhose.

Placebo fades.

We are there alone. Now I'm in a sofa, curled up until I feel safe once again and I unravel, ready to tell what's left to Trent. But the words don't come from my mouth, until he removes all the bandages, revealing the silicon and the bruises. Tears go down.

He twitches, but still keeps removing the bandages.

“Alex Turner...” He says softly and I nod.

I don't know where she ends and I begin. He traces my bloody lips and my balding head, I kiss him like I would kiss her and he kisses me like he would kiss all the love in the world. That's what we do. We report some people as dead, some as missing and others as created, deceased and... That's where we end.

We make the love we can-

And that's not enough.

The salt on my tongue resembles the one that Trent has kissed before. I know what I’m thinking of. Alex used to cheat, until he died and possessed me. Like an average demon which I should´ve expelled. 

Trent helped me cut the rest of my hair as we sat in the alleyway with broken mirrors. 

Who knew that we would be fighting after all contracting and dying from C.? 

I wasn’t myself, I was my beloved. It’s as if I had decided to give Alex another chance at living through my own body, Trent screamed at me as Alex was lifeless, his final wishes made and my first ones incoming, swallowing his soul and letting his desires consume me. 

Is this the fate of a woman? Is this the fate of a lover? The love is bigger when you can’t share it. 

It sounded wild. Weird. Awful, to hold her in my arms and knowing all the love and life she had to give to the world, with a very splitting headache. She was there to the last minute, through the China rumours to the Russian ones, to the assassinations, to the declarations of independence by Democrats who used their people to keep their guns close and then shoot to 

KILL.

And she had collapsed off the stage. Patient one making a run for her many, many moons ago, as her leg jerked on stage, her shadow reflecting a more horrific death. Who was patient zero and one?

Why did she die? 

Trent came to watch her many times, he knew how much I loved her and what had I given her and he never interfered, maybe that’s how sad and twisted his kiss against me was. Because it was all that was left of Alexa. I was a monster, a mixture of both. Her memories lived deep inside me. Her smile was no longer my own and Trent would observe me, as I drew lipstick on the bandages of my head, like Alexa would do, saying that it indeed did not matter how we would die, if we would die anyway. 

We didn’t end up speaking Russian or Chinese, we spoke English. All over. We couldn’t go to war, we had to be creative and this was the next big thing. 

C. 

A new world awaited us, where someone else was doing all of this to keep themselves alive. But who? It was like an awful game of guess who where we weren’t counting the deaths anymore as they were a given. Even children played with severed heads which were still breathing, in a state of shock with closed eyes, blessed the dead be. 

Life was not for the faint or weak anymore, life was luck and torture. 

Trent made it with his medical background, but he couldn’t save Alexa, because she died so fast and something happened. That she never left. That’s why it was us two against the world. I couldn’t understand it either. Why we were waltzing while loving the same woman who was long dead? I would take the other role, leaning backwards, and so would Trent, to watch a chandelier fall instead of each other’s eyes. 

We did have sex. 

He had grabbed my chin and thrown me against the wall, causing me to yelp in surprise, but it wasn’t like the awful angry sex. It was just secret as it could get. Stalls was the best you could do, but ours was an alleyway and standing, leg on waist and screaming from the blood and sudden carnal urges. He apologized deeply and I apologized for his ripped ear piercing. It was as if one wanted the other and the other didn’t. It felt like rape from both sides. We needed her. 

What bullshit this was, we would ask as we would rent beds until we could afford and now here we were… Soldiers with guns in the names of G. W. Bush. He was a democrat hero now. Easy… Easy… Easy… I shuddered at the thought as we dressed up and I did Trent’s tie. 

Lights went out and a tight, horrified screech came followed by a heart-breaking cry, just like the one me and Alexa heard one day, when she could still fake that she was okay. The person cried for hours and hours, we knew it was C. Before everyone was with homes and nothing was anarchy, not even the chips were starting to fall off the roofs. 

I remember people eating dogs, pigeons and fucking Greta on the streets. Cannibalism. We needed to kill each other in order to flip the page. But some didn’t want to die at all. 

Who the fuck would want tio die?

Suddenly even the suicidal ones would simply stop jumping off roofs, their weakened system or not, would give in. It was as if a desire alone to die would be fulfilled by God himself. 

I wondered who he was and if Jesus no longer paid for our sins, or were we in debt? 

Or maybe Jesus did a loan for strippers at a casino? Maybe he just stopped there and wasted all the money and grills and all. 

Smiled at God and said 

Fuck, dad, I wasted it, I wasted it all. 

Fuck you.

He leaned closer. 

Like any other teenager he did what anyone would do…

Fuck off, dear Father. Fuck off, DEAR FATHER. You’re no God to me. He spat in his mouth.


	2. Chapter 2

Is this the devil’s lost love triangle? If we were to play Russian Roulette and Alexa was the Devil, would that mean that we were forgotten by the Devil, and therefore there were no temptations according to God so we can roam free? What if God himself had fallen to his sins? 

Why was this creative method more torturous…? What if this was worse? But then the torture passed from spitting blood for a few seconds with fever and a cry cough to nothing at all? What about stillbirth? What if we all had been stillborn-

“What if we had all been born with complications… like a sacrifice to the Devil…? Send the baby straight to hell and medics had saved our lives.” Alexa had suggested once and looked directly at Trent. She had been right. Trent was born with lung complications, Alexa’s heart was simply not beating and I was chocked and all blue due to the cord around my neck. We had all needed faster births or being left alone.  
Being born was complicated. Covered in blood, the fruit of sex, fluids and a complicated mother to go with it. 

“So you’re telling me, Alexa, that I save lives which the devil wants?” She coughed at her own question. But we had no idea that it was contagious back then. Trent quieted down after he asked. 

The memory flashed in front of me like thunder, as I curled up to Trent, both of us sleeping... Or rather, trying to pretend. Trent would sleep with a gun under his pillow, once a scalpel, now a gun, knives and other things just to protect the love of his life and my own. We were angry at each other, we somehow still got along, even if Alexa twirled between the two of us. Once we even had a threesome. 

Kissing Trent for the first time was right after Alexa had fallen asleep and he was smoking outside, lighting the cigarette and blowing smoke into my mouth. We just shared her, but maybe that’s when we realized that it was more than sympathy that we felt for each other. 

We made love on that balcony. Legs intertwined and cigarettes discarded for sex. I remember licking down his sweat from collarbone to cock which wasn’t even wrapped in a condom earlier, so I had managed to suck him off clean and then swallow the next load, gagging. Who were we really in love with? What fear did we really hold? 

I held her hand, Trent crying at her death and I told her back what she wished for. 

To take everything hers and take care of Trent, like she would. 

But then leaders who were puppets were dying, exposing the new gun laws and all the hectic changes which were like a seesaw, some bad good bad good bad bad bad bad bad. It all fell. It feels like flashes when I recall, some harsh PTSD I’ve only heard of. Maybe the UN falling was the worse and all those crazies about global warming rejoicing were the first to be eaten, so that they wouldn’t have a voice. We were fighting against ourselves, that’s true, but in more complicated ways. 

I turned around and wrapped my arms against Trent. He suddenly jerked and exposed his woken state. 

“Oh. Hey. I wasn’t sleeping.” He said. I kissed him hastily and he kissed me back. 

“Me neither.” And we both sit up, he bandages me up, making out with me viciously… which is strange, considering he doesn’t really admit to loving me and that leaves u both flushed. I walk in wide heels. We carry our weapons to were people have C. there is no longer a point in masks. They never protected us and there is no difference. 

People wanted to build bombs, but instead all was dropped like a potted plant which never stood a chance to live with me. 

All of a sudden the Hermes bags were used like plastic to chew and blow bubble gum off. Consumerism dead and just survival instincts left in everyone’s place. We all just want to live somehow. 

I do not know. We keep walking, hand in hand, just for both of us to calm down and establish that there is some love and we name the number we´ve been together and that throws people off. There is always the question… How?

A few punches here and there and broken beds and heads, a lost lover to C. Our pool of love became sharper to see with blood instead of water and each other in the end. How did we have to live in an alleyway? Because all was destroyed. Not even tents, just alleyways… Just pick, settle and come back to your own things. The only order left in an antichrist´s head. God. God. God. Repetition makes me crazy as I enter, and Trent spends the day lying that C. is curable when it just migrates with its filthy hands to new hosts and take down lives. I close my eyes after every patient and pray to myself. God isn’t the one you´d believe now. 

We could take him down if we wanted to. That’s if… he was still alive, but the shadow vanishes and so does the reflection and the person. Leave humanity to do whatever they want, and they will be wild chimpanzees. See Marina Abramovic. 

I felt like things kept getting worse and worse, we would share everything and I just wanted to die. I felt like I couldn´t, as if I had some sort of obligation to Trent. I wanted freedom, which I would never have. Now we would forever be like this. There was no solution. 

Even if I would die, that wouldn´t change anything in the grand scale of things. I was no one and even if I blew my brains out, nothing would matter.

Nothing would matter. If we all blew our brains out, maybe then someone would hear our muffled cry for help. But what good would it do? 

It seemed strange to fully feel alone, when walking the streets for the last holding stores for a meal. Trent stayed inside his appointment room, even if it meant nothing. People would come one day and be dead the other. C. was not curable anymore, all medicine had gone into the wrong, now dead, hands and we were left with no means of survival. The last, the ashes on the tip of a burnt cigarette. Soon we´d be blown off and the bubble of humanity would burst. 

I often thought of Alexa and how I had shaken every morning since her death, my hands an dfingers would start to tremble and I’d start doing it side to side, until one day it stopped. My body understood that the stress would only increase from now on and I would die eventually, giving it its needed rest… 

And I would see the proper face of Alexa in my final moments and Trent would follow. I was more weak, so I only found it natural that I would die, but sometimes by the river, when I would drink pure alcohol alone, I wondered, what if this was it for Trent? What if he had to go first? 

Then I´d be alone. I didn´t win the lottery of turning into a tree after death and gaining some sense of immortality. I was alone. In those moments I just tried to make peace with it, but it would end with me storming into Trent´s room, taking off my bandages, regardless of everything, the scars, the unhealed wounds and the male appearance. I was tired and every day I was breaking. I couldn´t fathom what reality was and how come the absurdity of the past made more sense when we were free to roam around and everything. 

**Author's Note:**

> It's the last one in the series, but it can be easily read alone, as it has it's own story to tell. 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it! Thank you!


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